


Near No Accustomed Hand

by versayce



Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-16
Updated: 2015-03-16
Packaged: 2018-03-18 02:40:04
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,493
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3553004
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/versayce/pseuds/versayce
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>Killing and dying are nothing at all, except when it comes to Steve Rogers. Pathetic.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	Near No Accustomed Hand

**Author's Note:**

  * Translation into 中文 available: [远离故土](https://archiveofourown.org/works/3556595) by [Erix](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Erix/pseuds/Erix)



> This thing lives exclusively in the first two Captain America movies. And even that's tenuous. Sorry for any inconsistencies.
> 
> I wanted to write porn. Then I changed my mind. Then I wrote porn anyway. Title chosen poorly, last minute, from Yeats' "A Dream Of Death".

He drags him out of the water, disgusted. Heaps him on the shore, this man who offered his neck, who didn’t turn away from bared teeth. Death is his only leverage but with this one it amounted to nothing. He took too long to think, fist frozen in the air. A final blow and mission completed. Go back to the room. The silence of forgetting. But let his arm drop, let this man live, and what? He couldn’t see what happens next. He hesitated.

He understands then, before diving in after him, that the hesitation was a kind of choice too. The shadow of a decision. Above them, the sky is on fire, but under the water it’s quiet and cool. The whirring of his arm is amplified as he grabs on to him.

The Winter Soldier walks away. Hydra is weak. They can’t bring him in this time. There is nothing for him anywhere. And he is nothing.

Except, there is Steven Grant Rogers from the dossiers. The man who offered his neck. Who forfeit his life. It was his now.

‘Bucky,’ he’d said.

***

So Bucky watches Steve, longer than he’s ever watched anyone. You only need a few days if all you want is to kill. A few weeks at most if you want something more. Information. Infiltration. Extraction. He isn’t sure what he wants yet so he just keeps on watching as Steve Rogers flounders in the vacuum left by S.H.I.E.L.D.'s collapse, then finally high-tails it back to Brooklyn. Months.

Bucky remembers watching him like this before. Covering his back. The silent closeness offered by the scope. He could look all he wanted from that kind of distance, crosshairs framing Steve’s face. One day following the shifting lines of Steve’s back when he suddenly stops walking and Bucky stares at the sun on the back of his neck. He remembers it like a dream, not in the precise clinical way he remembers things now. How many yards to close the distance, schematics and layouts, wind speed, how many hostiles.

Now Bucky watches and Steve is just angles of attack, weak spots, openings. It’s not good enough. Bucky starts testing the waters, small tentative things.

Steve notices and tries not to let on, but he doesn’t have the necessary counter-surveillance training, Bucky thinks. His face can’t help but light up when he finds a photograph out of place, a book thumbed through and put back in the wrong spot. Bucky lets weeks pass between these experiments. He watches through the scope of his rifle. Steve’s breath knocked out of him for a moment. Face blanching, like he can’t believe it, like the edge of a rug kicked up and folded over just a little by Bucky’s dirty boot is some kind of a miracle.

***

The drugs begin to wear off as he misses doses. He wakes up every morning remembering the night before and things start sparking in his head. One time his footsteps make a hollow sound on the boardwalk as he follows Steve and suddenly the day turns into night-time, stringed up lights everywhere and the smell of the seawater is different, sweeter. He has his arm wrapped around bony shoulders and he’s laughing about something stupid, some story about a neighbour’s cat and a newspaper-wrapped fish left unattended for just one second on the stoop.

Another day Steve sits on the window sill in his apartment, big paper pad in his lap, and sketches a building long since torn down. Bucky watches and then remembers the spots where the floorboards would creaks the most, afternoon sun filtering in through gauzy curtains and setting the peeling plaster of the walls on fire. He remembers the unfocused look on Steve’s face as he draws, hand fluttering over paper. When he’s finished, Steve tears the page out and later that evening Bucky fishes it out of the recycling bin at the back of the building. That’s when he realizes Steve is doing it on purpose. Takes him walking through familiar places, leaves him gifts and clues to jog his freezer burned brain.

He tacks the drawing to the wall next to the spot where he sleeps in a condemned building, and looking at it, he remembers more. The dirt in the street out front. How the couple in the apartment below them would argue so loud that sometimes they’d stop eating dinner and listen, on edge, wondering if they should intervene.

But remembering isn’t the same as being. He remembers, but he’s still the same nothing, a placeholder, a vehicle for the person he was and the thing he was made into.

He follows Steve to the cemetery, where he does the rounds – parents, friends, teachers, comrades and then, him. By the time he gets to that last stop Steve is out of flowers. Probably thinks he doesn’t need them anymore, and something inside Bucky twists in a dark ugly way because he’s dead, just as dead as the rest of them, only Steve doesn’t seem to get it.

For the first time in years he wants something. He wants to make him understand.

***

He waits for him in the dark, in his living room, like he’s waited for so many people before. He’s there to hurt him, only that’s not like before because he hasn’t brought a gun or a knife. A different kind of hurt.

There’s a sofa across from the door, facing the entrance, so he sits there and waits. He traces the route in his head from cemetery to brownstone, calculates the ETA, and Rogers is there right on schedule, frozen for a moment with the hallway light flooding in behind him.

“Bucky,” he rasps, and closes the door without turning around, maybe worried that if he looks away Bucky might disappear. Bucky thinks he just might.

Neither of them speaks for a long time. Steve just looks and looks and Bucky watches him do it, every thought so clear on his face, and he isn’t sure if that’s because Steve is so transparent or because he used to know him so well.

Eyes narrow a bit – some unfamiliar scar catalogued. A quick look dips down his body and then back up – he’s lost weight, hasn’t bothered to eat as much as he should. Eyebrows knit together, then relax – his hair is long, it looks strange, but Steve can’t bring himself to mind.

Steve comes closer to where he’s sitting, light steps almost completely silent, like he’s sneaking up on a spooked animal, his eyes never leaving Bucky for one second. Bucky lets him. The closer he comes the easier it will be to understand. Finally he stops, just a few more steps between them, and Bucky can see how his chest heaves, how his hands twitch at his sides wanting to grab and hold on.

He stands up quick, fluid, and in some deep down part of himself he’s pleased when Rogers sways back just a tiny bit. Afraid.

“You should know—” Bucky starts, his voice unfamiliar and jarring from disuse— “He’s dead.”

A frown splits Steve’s face and he shakes his head - “No. Bucky you’re right here.” - reaches out to touch, but his hand finds empty space. Bucky’s already across the room, then out the window, up the fire escape and lost among rooftops. He runs, but wonders why.

***

Bucky remembers being strapped down to metal, drugged and beaten, taken apart. That first time. The army called it torture but now he understands it was just growing pains. A dress rehearsal for everything that comes after. Necessary, because it’s only then that he finally understands Steve, all fever-racked, beaten up, turned down, sorry-for-your-loss, 4F of him. Steve nurturing his all-American death wish while Bucky tried to forget, laughed and danced and slipped his hand up all those skirts like for him there was no wall, nothing the world could dash him against. In that isolation ward he finally saw it, hovering in the corners where walls met ceiling. Not like on the front, brief bright flashes, but death as a constant presence.

After, he’d looked at Steve differently. The war-period photos and movie reels of Bucky Barnes at the Smithsonian show him drawn, shadowed. The smile still comes easy but it doesn’t quite reach his eyes. All the barely hidden sidelong glances. It’s like they made Steve bigger just to drive the point home, a visual representation of how much space he took up in his life – he’s all you’ve got, James Buchanan Barnes. Don’t you fuck it up.

Now he watches through his scope, Steve dragging a chair from the kitchen and sitting down across from the sofa where Bucky’d been sitting just a few days ago. He watches him shift forward, run a hand across his face, lean on his elbows. His lips are moving, like he’s talking to that empty space, but it’s far enough away that Bucky can’t read what he’s saying. It’s the third time in as many days.

Steve – skinny asthmatic throwing himself on a grenade, trumped-up chorus girl walking into a Hydra compound all by himself, crashing the Valkyrie into frozen nothingness, 20th century relic letting The Winter Soldier beat him to a bloody pulp – is suddenly balking in the face of death. Of Bucky’s death. It’s pathetic but not in the disgusted way most people mean it.

The consuming grief of it, he realizes, that’s what made him run that night, incapable of letting Steve lay a hand on him in that awful, familiar way.

And Bucky sees now that he’s just the same, loitering on rooftops and ducking down alleys after this man whose life he thinks he owns. Nothing and no one in the spaces between this and sleep, his metal arm forever frozen above his head in the upswing of a death blow he could never have delivered. Killing and dying are nothing at all, except when it comes to Steve Rogers. Pathetic.

***

He tries again. Takes down the drawing tacked up on the wall and folds it neatly into an inside pocket in his jacket. He gathers everything he so much as touched in that abandoned room he’s been sleeping in and burns it in a disused underpass. He knows what he wants now and there’s no walking away from it.

The chair is still there, opposite the sofa, when he slips inside Steve’s apartment again.

It’s dark and quiet so he makes enough noise as he walks to the bedroom to make sure Steve’s awake by the time he’s standing in the doorway. And he is, sitting up in bed, hair mussed, blanket tossed aside in an instinctual half-asleep panic that’s since passed. Never comfortable enough to sleep in the buff, Bucky remembers, not even shirtless.

This time it’s Steve who’s holding still, who watches his face as Bucky assess.

Hands fisted tight in the sheets by his side – he’s scared, maybe of Bucky being there, maybe of Bucky leaving. Slight dark circles bruising his eye sockets, as much as that’s possible after the serum – not just from tonight, but from not sleeping well in months, since he’s acquired Bucky as a shadow. Jaw clenched, mouth set in a firm line – wanting to speak, but not knowing what to say.

That’s ok, Bucky can fix that.

It’s only a few steps to the bed and then he’s crawling up the length of it on his hands and knees, over Steve’s body, metal arm coming to rest against his throat and pinning him down. No resistance. Not even a sound. Steve looks up at him kind of glassy-eyed, the same way Bucky used to look up at the shadows seething in the upper seams of that room where for days and days he thought that he was going to die.

But Bucky kisses him instead and it’s the complete opposite of death. It’s small and hot and barely there but under him Steve is eager. Back then he was eager too, and Bucky starts to remember the one time they’d kissed before. Steve was still small. He doesn’t remember why they’d done it or who started it but he remembers the fiery sun-filled room, in that sketch of a building he’s got tucked away on him.

Steve strains up into the kiss, against the metal at his throat, and he’ll hurt himself if Bucky doesn’t move so he pulls away, the soothing hum of his arm following suit. Like that, knees framing Steve’s hips, it feels unfamiliar. New. But Steve wants it, it’s plain on his face, all broken open. In his eyes, flitting from lips to hands, down his body, and back up to lips again. The atmosphere is suddenly heavy, stifling, and Bucky thinks he understands.

“You loved him,” he mutters, a little awed.

Steve is taken aback for a second, then looks at him like he’s slow, says, “I love _you_.”

Bucky closes his eyes, wants to hurt him. To hit him. Make him understand that the kid Steve’s mooning over is just a frozen corpse in the mountains somewhere and that he’s not him, he’s something different, something worse, but he opens his eyes back up, metal fingers twitching in anticipation of violence, and something in Steve’s face stops him.

Because he already knows. And not just that, but he’s different too. Bucky's seen it plenty these last few months, from a safe distance, but it never sank in. Steve’s tired. He’s hurt and unsure like he’s never been before. He’s displaced, untethered, on the brink of something deep and dark and wide, pulling him in.

“Ok,” Bucky says, “ok,” and leans back down, this time no forearm pressed to Steve’s throat, just kissing and letting himself tilt lower and lower until their bodies are flush.

Their bodies that aren’t their own. Just tools, broken and remade for someone else’s purposes, and it feels so good to be able to move the way he wants, the way that floods him all full of warmth. Under him, Steve is new and different too. That makes it easier. He pushes up the plain white shirt Steve’s wearing, so army regulation, and stops kissing, pulls back a bit, to look at the mostly-faded mess of scar tissue on his abdomen. 7 hours in surgery, Bucky knows.

He’s not sorry. He was The Winter Soldier. He was out of his mind. Nothing he could have done differently. He did that to Steve but now he can do so many other things to him besides. Because he didn’t land that last punch. Because he pulled him out of the water. Because Steve loves him and Steve is his, and Bucky is going to take full advantage of that while he still can.

Dry lips drag against the small patch of knotted, puckered flesh on Steve’s belly. Slow. He breathes through his mouth, tries his tongue, wants to feel and taste, everything all at once with this, what he’s done.

Steve’s breathing goes erratic, and for a second Bucky tenses, remembers asthma and hospital visits. It’s not like that anymore. Relax, Barnes. Steve’s fingers card through his hair as he carries on placing small appreciative kisses on his handiwork, the marks he left. He stops and looks up. Steve lets out a long breath, unsteady hand brushing Bucky's hair to one side, out of his face. It should be uncomfortable to stare like this, but to them it isn’t, not anymore.

“Come here,” Steve says, and for the first time in months Bucky follows an order, unthinking.

He remembers it all being different. The girls would giggle, he would smile. He’d pause for effect and say something dirty that would really get them going. This, him and Steve, is just breathing, animal half-sounds, not stopping to think or plan.

He wants to roll his hips, so he does, and Steve’s hips come up in response. He thinks he hasn’t had an erection in years. Can’t remember the last time he wanted to press himself into something soft and warm and keep pressing until he came. That’s what he wants now, though, hips stuttering and slamming into Steve, so close until Steve’s hands come up and still him. He’s panting too, but he holds Bucky’s hips firm in place through a couple of failed attempts at grinding down.

Bucky gives in and waits. It’s ok, this isn’t Steve saying ‘stop’. Bucky watches him swallow, squeeze his eyes shut, lick his lips, compose himself. Then he’s pushing back, bringing both of them up to their knees, hands still on Bucky’s hips. He moves so slowly, carefully, brings his hands up to tug Bucky’s jacket off his shoulders, gives him a small nod, ‘undress’, then turns his attention to his own clothes.

It’s just a shirt, sweatpants, and boxers so he’s done first, kneels there opposite Bucky and watches him toss worn, dirty layers to the floor. Then he’s lying back down and Bucky follows, like a string being pulled somewhere in his core, covers Steve with his body and goddamn was this ever a good idea. Skin-on-skin feels amazing. Bucky’s cock throbs between their bellies, lined up against Steve’s, and he moves a little, experimentally.

He’s never done this before. Can’t remember it, anyway. Not like this, with another man hard underneath him, rocking his hips just a little, the minute friction of it too much and not enough. They lie like that for a while, barely moving, before Bucky realizes that Steve must not have done it before either. His face is buried in Bucky’s neck, sometimes kissing and sometimes just breathing hard, arms locked up tight around Bucky’s torso, and Bucky thinks the sap would probably be happy if this was it.

But there’s a dark pit of want in Bucky’s belly, radiating out warmth and fullness and anticipation. He lifts up for a second and snakes his good hand in between them, wrapping it around both their cocks, then settles back to enjoy the tightness, the heat, the way Steve feels in his hand, against him.

He starts up thrusting again and Steve doesn’t need any further encouragement to join in, moans, “Bucky…” into his neck and Bucky says, “Yeah,” which earns another moan and then Steve is kissing him and that’s when Bucky loses his hyper-awareness, his calculating and analyzing, can’t remember the next morning if they fucked against each other for 20 seconds or 20 minutes. The whole of his consciousness is compressed to the space between their bodies and suddenly it’s so slick and hot and wet there.

Steve is grunting, groaning, this guttural sound he’s never heard him make before, shaking through it, and Bucky wants to be there too, wants to spill all the tension building and building. He squeezes harder and Steve gasps, twists under him, wraps himself tighter around Bucky’s body and then finally it’s whiteout, like falling, like electricity coursing through him, and he screams because it’s painfully familiar but so different, so good. The opposite of death.

***

He doesn’t make to move off Steve for a while. Couldn’t even if he wanted to. He pulls his hand out from between them, rests his forehead against Steve’s chest. His hips are still making small rolling movements, just barely sliding their cocks together in the slippery heat between them because it feels good. Slow quiet aftershocks. Steve’s hand is back in his hair, fingers tangled and working in small circles against his scalp.

It feels like hours before he moves, slow and stiff, to roll off. The sudden cold against his skin is jarring but he pushes off the bed anyway, gets to his feet before Steve grabs his metal wrist. He can’t feel it but he looks down and it’s a white-knuckled grip, would hurt if it was his other arm.

Steve huffs. “If you climb out the window and disappear right now I’m going to lose my mind.”

“I won’t,” Bucky says, real low in his throat.

Steve hesitates for a beat, but then lets go and the servos in Bucky’s arm whirr in a way that sounds almost relieved. Bucky shuffles around the room naked, kicking at the piles of clothes in the dark until his toes find his jacket. He kneels and retrieves the sketch Steve left for him. Unfolds it, looks. Steve is up on his elbows, wants to know what all the rustling is about and when he sees it his face turns soft and smooth. Bucky thinks he’s never seen him look like that, not even before.

The sketch goes on the nightstand, leaned up against a sad lamp that’s seen better days. The room is velvety dark. The floor doesn’t creak when he stumbles back toward the bed. It’s not the same as it used to be. Neither one of them is who they were before. But it’s good anyway. A continuation.


End file.
